Disagreement Is Not a Wound. Stop Treating It Like One.

I used to be a general manager of a Cinnabon. Yep, I went to work every day and came home smelling like that cinnamony goodness. But part of being a GM came with the responsibility of hiring and firing kids who, most of the time, were on their first job. I told my brother the other day I'm glad I don't do it anymore because I felt like I had to walk on eggshells whenever I had to correct someone.

You can't correct kids today. You can't push them. The moment they sense criticism coming, they're already composing their resignation in their head. You have to approach the whole thing like you're MacGyver defusing a bomb, and even then, sometimes it goes off anyway.

Now I am attributing that attitude to kids. But in adult life, if you look, you'll find the same attitude in grown adults too.

There's an old saying: hard times make tough men, tough men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. It's a cycle. And if you look around right now, we are well into the soft men portion of the program.

We have been comfortable for a long time. Catered to. Entertained. Told that discomfort is damage and that criticism is cruelty. Every institution from schools to workplaces has spent decades sanding down the edges of hard feedback until what's left isn't honesty.

The whole of culture has lost the ability to disagree like adults. Somewhere along the way, discourse got replaced with labels. Disagree with someone today and you are not wrong …. you are evil. You are not mistaken …you are dangerous. We have watched political opponents get shouted off stages and, in the darkest moments, killed. Because someone simply landed on the other side of a question.

C.S. Lewis saw it coming. He wrote in Mere Christianity

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

And Christians have absorbed that culture whether we meant to or not.

A disagreement has become a personal attack. A hard question from a friend has become a betrayal. A sermon that lands on a nerve has become evidence that someone doesn't love you.

But nobody is being persecuted. Nobody is being imprisoned. Nobody is being asked to pay anything close to the price Christians throughout history paid without complaint.

"Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated  of whom the world was not worthy." (Hebrews 11:35-38) 

We're just being disagreed with.

And we're not handling it well.

The church did not invent this. We just absorbed it. And we should know better. Because we actually have a framework for disagreement. We have Scripture. We have the body. We have brothers and sisters who are commanded to speak truth in love and receive it the same way. The world is making it up as it goes. We are not supposed to be.

Scripture doesn't share our squeamishness. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." (Proverbs 27:6) The man who never tells you when you're wrong isn't your friend. He's just comfortable around you. And comfort is not the same thing as loving.

Hebrews 12 says discipline is painful rather than pleasant.

"For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Hebrews 12:11)

The harvest, righteousness and peace comes after the pain, not instead of it. You don't get the fruit without the pruning. But we've been trained by a culture that treats pruning as abuse.

We've confused disagreement with rejection so thoroughly that we can no longer tell the difference between someone sharpening us and someone attacking us. A brother can disagree with you and still love you. 

"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." (Proverbs 27:17)

A blade that can't be sharpened is just a dull piece of metal that isn’t useful. 

Christians need thicker skin.

Not because kindness doesn't matter. It does.

But because a faith that cannot survive a hard question was never going to survive hard times. And hard times always come.

The goal is to become the kind of person whose first response to correction isn't a wounded ego. Because the brother who loves you enough to tell you the truth is rarer than you think.

Love you dearly. Jacob.